* Animations! Yes, now picom officially supports animations. For examples, and information on how to configure it, please go to our [documentation site](https://picom.app/#_animations). There are some video clips in #1253 as well. (#1220 #1253#1303#1305#1308#1310)
* Universal window rules (#1284). One option to rule them all! Added new configuration option `rules` to replace all existing rule options, and to provide more flexibility on top of that. See [picom(1)](https://picom.app/#_window_rules) for more details. This can be used to configure per-window animations.
*`@include` directives in config file now also search in `$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/picom/include` and `$XDG_CONFIG_DIRS/picom/include`, in addition to relative to the config file's parent directory.
*`override_redirect` in rules now only matches top-level windows that doesn't have a client window. Some window managers (e.g. awesome) set override_redirect for all window manager frame windows, causing this rule to match against everything (#625).
* Type and format specifiers are no longer used in rules. These specifiers are what you put after the colon (':') in rules, e.g. the `:32c` in `"_GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS@:32c"`. Now this information is ignored and the property is matched regardless of format or type.
* New predefined target for conditions: `group_focused`. This target indicate whether the focused window is in the same window group as the window being matched.
* Meaning of `window_type` in conditions changed slightly, now it supports windows with multiple types. (However the behavior of `wintypes` remains unchanged.)
* Setting `--shadow-exclude-reg` is now a hard error. It was deprecated almost since the start of `picom`. `--clip-shadow-above` is the better alternative. (#1254)
* The X critical section is removed, picom no longer grabs the server to fetch updates. Hopefully, if everything works, this change is unnoticeable. Minor responsiveness improvements could be possible, but I won't bet on it. The main point of this change is this makes debugging much less painful. Previously if you breaks inside the X critical section, the whole X server will lock up, and you would have to connect to the computer remotely to recover. Now there is no longer such worries. This also avoids a bug inside Xorg that makes server grabbing unreliable.
* picom now uses dithering to prevent banding. Banding is most notable when using a strong background blur. (#952)
* Frame pacing. picom uses present feedback information to schedule new frames when it makes sense to do so. This improves latency, and replaces the `glFlush` and `GL_MaxFramesAllowed=1` hacks we used to do for NVIDIA. (#968 #1156)
* Some missing features have been implemented for the EGL backend (#1004 #1007)
## Bug fixes
* Many memory/resource leak fixes thanks to @absolutelynothelix . (#977 #978#979#980#982#985#992#1009#1022)
* Fix tiling of wallpaper. (#1002)
* Fix some blur artifacts (#1095)
* Fix shadow color for transparent shadows (#1124)
* Don't spam logs when another compositor is running (#1104)
* Fix rounded corners showing as black with the xrender backend (#1003)
